So I’m currently sitting at a Chinese kindergarten in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and four little boys keep peeking at me and are giggling their little heads off. They are the cutest little boys ever! [I really need to catch up with this journal.]
To finish my birthday night – Mai Shoua and I, to everyone else’s concern, took a cab by ourselves to Fuc Tan. When we got there it was kind of dead and seemed like some sort of basement/garage/bar party. Mai Shoua bought each of us a beer and we got approached right away by some cute Vietnamese guys. One was Oc and the other didn’t share his name. We met this chick named Cindy who is Vietnamese and from California. She looked 23 – but she was 34! She was out mother for the night, making sure we were having fun and kissing us on the cheeks all the time.
The other Vietnamese guy (cute one) started dancing with me as Mai Shoua danced with the French guy named Joe was 19. Then I leaned in and kissed this Vietnamese guy! Not make out, just a kiss and immediately regretted it. He wouldn’t leave me alone! He said, “Can I kiss you?”, waited for no response – and kissed me. Again. I knew at this point I had to ignore him. So I continued dancing. Joe (who I kept calling David) dipped me a few times while we were dancing. We also all did dancing in a circle where we all had our arms around each other – like six of us. It was so fun! I’m glad the whole group didn’t go .
Then I decided to ask some of the other Westerners where they were from. The four guys I approached were from Ireland and had the sexiest accents ever! I don’t think I had ever had a conversation with an Irish man before. One guy kept talking to me, and guessed I was from the States. I told him it was my 21st birthday and he said he was 23. Then he asked, “Do you have a boyfriend?” I responded, “Well, back in the states…” He said, “Then can I have a birthday kiss? …” “… YES!” So we kissed – just a kiss, nothing else. I forget what else we talked about because I couldn’t really understand him through all the noise and his thick ass accent. Then he offered to buy me a shot – I requested tequila. It was a good shot, because a free shot is always a good shot. By this point, I’m hammered. I lie to Mai Shoua that Nick and I are on a break and tell her (the truth) that me and this guy were going to go outside because I couldn’t hear a word he was saying.
We went outside – I pulled him by the hand – and he leans me up against one of the cars and we began kissing. HE WAS SUCH A GREAT KISSER. Amazing. I stopped us at one point and said, “You came to Vietnam to kiss Vietnamese girls! No American girls!” Then I asked if he had ever kissed an American girl – he said no – and I giggled and said I had never kissed an Irish boy before either (let alone a European guy). We continued making out. I must had stopped again at some point, but all I remember is him saying, “My God, you’re such a good kisser.” That was hot. I did the whole hand on this face, neck, hair thing with the other hand on his waist – it was sexy – and id I had been single, not on my period, and not heading to Cambodia at six am – three hours from then – I might have considered sleeping with him. Mai Shoua then came outside with the Vietnamese guys and we decided that we should leave. I wrote my name in his phone and he said, “I’m Stephen Flynn – I’ll Facebook you.” He hasn’t yet (and never did) but Facebook is hard to get in that part of Vietnam. God he was such a great kisser and had the sexiest accent ever.
January 9th
I woke up still drunk, which made the plane rides horrible. We flew to Vientiane, Laos, and had a one hour layover of which I slept on a chair. I was dying from staying out so late and drinking so much. Drink count by the end of the night was six beers and two shots of tequila – yikes! The second flight was a little more manageable, but the landing was horrible. I acquired mild motion sickness, while Darla acquired extreme motion sickness and puked. Michelle forgot her camera on the plane and Mai Shoua forgot her passport on the plane. Luckily they were able to retrieve both items before we left the airport.
Our first stop was the hotel and then we went to the Royal Palace where many monks dressed in orange were. It was pretty and we took our shoes off a lot [which I LOVE] to enter the various temples. I wish we had had more time to ourselves to think and less time listening to Kun, our tour guide, talk. It would have been a great opportunity for me to collect my thoughts and regroup after being constantly surrounded by people and the same people 24/7.
Afterwards we were unable to avert the city cyclo tour around Phnom Penh. We’ve all given up in that sense. We stopped at the most random places and got random group pictures. We stopped at the post office for four minutes … cool. I changed cyclo drivers, realizing my cyclo driver was going to be offended. I changed back though. What’s up with people pairing up and seeing change as not liking the first person?
We went to some restaurant that trains street kids how to be servers. They had fried tarantulas and red ants on the menu! The food was really good, but it was expensive compared to what we are used to. After this meal we went back to the hotel and I fell asleep at 8:45 pm while reading my book “The Perfect War.”
January 10th [Also partly academic journal]
At 8:30 am we started the day off on a sad note. We went to the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum. It was the former office [S.21] of the Kampuchea Democratic Khmer Rouge Regime. It used to be an old high school, but it was converted into a death camp for people the Khmer Rouge believed were against the revolution. These people were usually ‘elites’ or those who were from the urban areas and were thought to have a lot of money – comedians, actors, singers, teachers, merchants, Vietnamese, business people – the list goes on. The people hadn’t done anything, but they were tortured horribly. They had their fingernails or nipples ripped off, drowned until unconscious, hung by limbs until unconcious, shackled together with fifty other people lying down in a room, water thrown on them, kicked, hit, beaten with tree branches, and while it was not mentioned, I’m positive the women were brutally raped. But no women survived so there were no women to tell the story of what happened behind those doors.
The Khmer Rouge took pictures of every single man, woman, child, and baby that went threw S-21. It was a wretched feelings staring into the eyes of these people knowing they all had suffered here, been tortured here, and died either there or in the killing fields 15 kilometers away. The Khmer Rouge used young people from the villages- teenagers to late twenties – to torture these people. Indoctrinating the youth of the rural, uneducated areas into killing and torturing machines was very easy to do. It gave these young people something to believe in, but they also put these people in a position of danger – “Torture and kill these people or we will kill you and find someone else to do the job.” What a sick game. Then those kids would torture innocent people until the innocent people either died or confessed to made up stories. So the kids validated torturing these people who wouldn’t confess because they thought those that didn’t confess were lying and therefore guilty and those that do confess are guilty. Everyone’s guilty then and deserves to die!
After this we went to the Choeung Ek Killing Fields. This is the place they took the prisoners to when they were no longer of use to the Khmer Rouge. They would smash babies and toddlers against the ‘killing tree’ and smash people with shovels as they pushed them into the mass graves after slitting their throats with banana tree bark. [Killing people with guns and bullets was too expensive, so they killed them in alternative ways. This resulted in many people being buried alive.] They buried people everywhere in this field – even though all this heinous killing and burying was done in an old Chinese cemetery. People excavated 26 of the 120-ish mass graves. One of the graves contained people with no heads and one contained only naked women and children. Since many of the 20,000 people killed are still buried, clothes can be found everywhere. Articles of clothing are slowly uprooting from underground – so much so that it looks like clothing is literally growing out of the soil. It’s so eery and so sobering. The people who take care of the grounds collect clothing everyday that free themselves from the ground. To think that the last time those clothes saw daylight was under the most traumatizing of experiences. If only clothes could talk. There is a huge stupa that was created to house the nearly 8,000 skulls from the excavated graves. It is so sad. To think that we’re all dust in the wind and that one day I’ll be just a skull, too.
Later on, sitting in the hotel room…
After that reality check, Kun wanted to take us to an orphanage. An ORPHANAGE. Why in the world would we want to go to an ophanage after that? Why in the world would us white foreigners feel the right to go stare at some poor, orphaned children in a third world country like they’re some sort of exhibit? We averted this event because we didn’t feel it was right. Instead we went out to eat at a market.
On a lighter note, my lunch that day consisted of some deep fried spinach patty, Cambodian ban my, a green Fanta, and an avocado shake. Avocado shakes are amazing. It sounds kinda gross, but it reminded me a lot of a green tea shake. We spent some time at the market and I got Nick another bracelet.
We went to the Cambodian National Museum after this. Besides the lingas, the museum was overwhelming and kind of boring [sorry Dreux]. They had people with flowers and money offerings set up for different Hindu and Buddhist gods and they try to get you to pay money to put a flower in a vase in front of the statue. I got away with not paying and just put the flower in the jar with a bow. No big deal. But apparently it was a big deal because after doing that, this crazy Australian lady came up to me and asked why I did it. I said that they must want me to give a flower to this statue and that maybe it was apart of their religion.
“But why the money?”
“Because it’s probably going towards the museum and church and people who work here. I don’t know. I never give money.”
“THE MONEY DOESN’T GO TO THE POOR PEOPLE! WHY GIVE THE MONEY!?”
I tried to shrug it off as “Yeah, I know,” but she kept attacking me so I said, “I am a student. I did not give money and have no money to give. Next time think before you approach someone. It you had actually watched carefully, you would have seen that I gave no money.”
She then started yelling at some statue and walked away. No one tries to make me feel stupid without me standing up for myself. Anyways, we went on a boat ride on the Mekong River, a tributary of the Mekong Delta. Jake, Mai Shoua, and I had a Cambodia beer on the boat. There was also a really cute dog that chilled at the front of the boat – oh the life. There were boat people who lived on boats on the river – it was a Muslim community.
We went out for dinner at a restaurant Kun suggested, but it was so expensive! We need to stop taking his suggestions! Nine dollars a person – and yes it was quoted in dollars! There were people that sang on the stage – mostly women – and while they were the hosts, we got the feeling that were escorts, too. Some of them looks too young to be taken home by old drunk men at the end of the night, though.
Today
Today we didn’t do a whole lot and it was nice. We finally got to interview some people again – and this time some women! Finally got my women’s health questions answered by women! Dreux translated for me for one of the women I talked to. The other girl I interviewed was 23 and spoke English. She had never heard of contraceptives such as condoms before. She only heard of a pill that women can take after they get married so they don’t get pregnant.
The place we conducted the interviews at was a Chinese temple with a Chinese kindergarten and elementary and middle school attached to it. It was pretty high tech, too! Projectors, computer rooms, etc. They get donors from all over the world and the school is one of the top schools in Cambodia. All Chinese learning books are sent there by the Chinese government and they dispense them throughout the country. As I wrote before, the little boys kept waving and giggling because of me writing in this journal [this has been converted to a blog]. One yelled, “What’s your name?” and ran behind a tree giggling and I said, “My name is Kate. What is your name?” They were so cute! And when I left they waved and said, “Good bye! See you tomorrow!” What dolls.
The rest of the day was chill. Michelle and I went to a very nice coffee house that reminded me of home. I got a blended mocha coffee and felt a little less homesick. Michelle and I chatted and searched for food, but most places were done serving food until dinnertime. [Street food seems like it’s people making food for their families and then extra for selling.] We came back to the hotel and I bought BBQ off-brand Pringles and coconut milk. Not too filling. Made me feel sick. We had lecture for two hours. I knew a lot of what Dreux was talking about so I was able to follow the lecture a lot better than I think others did.
We went to an Indian restaurant tonight and waited an hour for our food. We were SO hungry, so of course it tasted really good. It reminded me of home too and helped me with my slight homesickness. While I’m excited to go home in a week, I’m really starting to get used to being away. Not sure I want to go home yet. I feel like there is a hump that one must go over to be able to be away from home for a long time and I think I’m just about over that hump. I’m right at the top and slowly making the descent down.
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (and Tuk-tuks, Taxis, Cyclos, Buses, Bicycles, and Boats) 